Stephen Sossaman

Stephen Sossaman is Professor Emeritus of English at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. He now lives in California. He was an artillery fire direction computer in Viet Nam, serving in the Mekong Delta (1/84th artillery, 9th Infantry Division).

This companion book to the excellent 2015 Getty Center exhibition of WWI art gathers 14 essays about 14 artists by 14 art historians. Their commentaries are uniformly excellent in their balancing biography, culture, and brief analyses of or observations about …

William Conelly’s wonderful new poetry collection, Uncontested Grounds (Able Muse Press, 2014), includes five war poems well worth our attention. Conelly is a veteran of the United States Air Force, although the war poems here come not from his personal …

Unlike most books of poetry, which are collections of separate poems ignoring each other like subway commuters, Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Camouflage for the Neighborhood is better understood, in fact only understood, as a single coherent work, the whole being far greater …

Poets and War is calling for communities to create an annual Civilian War Casualties Day. We need to spend a few moments away from celebrity news and mass entertainment to better understand how wars have inflicted enormous suffering on civilians.…

If Alice Oswald’s Memorial is not the greatest English-language war poem of modern times, I can hardly wait to discover a better one. The new American edition (Norton, 2012) includes a useful Afterword by Eavan Boland.

Written and published in 1918, “High Wood” (on our site) is sometimes praised for its prescience about tourists visiting unimaginably ghastly battlefields not yet cleared of military detritus and bodies. But Europeans had already established such tours after …

A Qatari poet, Mohammed ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami, was sentenced in November 2012 to life imprisonment, apparently for writing a poem, “Tunisian Jasmine,” that applauds Arab Spring uprisings. The poem praising specific actions in Tunisia was officially interpreted in Qatar as …